Matamoros, Mexico – Aurora Leticia Cruz has tried to keep up with her blood pressure medication since she fled Guatemala more than a year ago, but the limbo she is in – stranded in a refugee camp in the Texas border after crossing Mexico – has made it difficult.
When Creu felt dizzy one day recently as her pressure rose, it may have been a tragedy, leaving her 17-year-old granddaughter and two great-grandchildren under 3 alone in the camp in Matamoros. But instead, an Oregon nurse and a Cuban doctor, who like Cruz is waiting to complete her asylum application process in the United States, managed to examine her medical history and prescribe the correct dose.
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The health workers who helped Creu are part of Global Response Management, a non-profit organization that seeks to go beyond simple crisis response and build a system to facilitate the medical follow-up of migrants traveling from Central America to on the Mexican border with the United States. Cross Medical History was created in June by the group, which has been gathering information from patients.
“I conceive of this as a relay race in which we are passing the medical baton to other providers as people move north,” said Blake Davis, a Maine paramedic who is a volunteer with the organization.
Such efforts are part of a growing trend in humanitarian aid that has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted the difficulties in providing basic medical care to migrants. As public hospitals are overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, migrants with heart disease or difficult pregnancies have no one to turn to. Others have received ineffective prescriptions because doctors are forced to treat them without a medical history.
Global Response Management is led by veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces and is made up primarily of U.S. volunteers and paid asylum seekers who were medical professionals in their countries. The group has cared for thousands of migrants in the past year at two Matamoros clinics, including one inside the camp.
The medical workers in the group have innovated to bring health care in their austere environment, taking advantage of what they have learned from the organization’s work with displaced people in countries such as Iraq and Bangladesh.
They have used telemedicine to consult specialists in the United States and have connected a portable device to an iPhone to perform sonograms. They have also worked with local authorities in the camp to control the spread of the coronavirus, encouraging the use of masks, increasing the number of handwashing stations and establishing an isolation area.
Only one person in the camp has been hospitalized with the virus, although medical facilities in the area underwent work to address the high number of infected patients this summer.
But the group’s goal is not just to care for migrants once they arrive at the border. It wants to provide medical care along the routes taken by migrants.
“Humanitarian aid must be seen in a different light,” said the group’s executive director Helen Perry, an Army Reserve nurse.
It is unclear how long the camp will last, as U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to reverse a government policy by President Donald Trump that has forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers. to wait in Mexican territory while their cases are settled in the courts of the United States.
In any case, people will continue to flee violence and poverty in Central America, and humanitarian groups are trying to find ways to protect them.
Davis, the Maine paramedic, plans to set up a clinic next year in Tapachula, on Mexico’s southern border. He recently flew by helicopter over the terrain that migrants cross into Guatemala to see the challenges medical teams would face in caring for people in transit.
“There’s nothing here for them to get help from,” Davis said. “We want to be able to fill that gap.”
The group works to connect migrants with health care and other resources by asking them what they need for WhatsApp. The idea is to get in touch with migrants as soon as possible, address their health issues before they get worse, and create a system where doctors along the way can access their medical history.
It is an overwhelming task that will require finding migrants – many of whom are trying to avoid being detected – and gaining their trust. Group members must also secure the cooperation of public officials.
And they must be careful that medical data is not used against migrants. As they do in Matamoros, the group will label each story with a number, rather than a name.
Other support groups are also facing the challenge.
Next month, the International Rescue Committee will officially launch InfoDigna, an interactive map in Mexico that connects migrants with hostels, health care providers and other services wherever they are. It will offer live chats to answer migrants ’questions on topics as varied as the most recent restrictions for COVID-19, down to the status of processes in immigration courts.
InfoDigna is part of the group’s global digital information service, which provides information to asylum seekers from Italy to Colombia via smartphones.
“He meets the people where they are,” said Edith Tapia, coordinator of the initiative in Mexico.
Organizations fill a gap that the WHO has urged governments in new countries to fill, but few have. The problem of how to care for vulnerable people on the move is likely to intensify: a record 80 million people are currently fleeing poverty, conflict and natural disasters, according to the WHO.
Maria de Jesús Ruiz Carrasco said she would have lost her footing if she had not attended Global Response Management.
The 31-year-old Cuban was rescued by Border Patrol agents who found her in October along the Rio Bravo with a broken leg after crossing from Matamoros.
She underwent two surgeries at a hospital in Brownsville, Texas. But two weeks later, Carrasco was deported to Matamoros with a sore wound and 14 nails in his leg. U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection regulations recommend that asylum seekers with medical problems not be returned to Mexico.
The agency said that due to privacy laws it could not discuss Carrasco’s case, but generally if a patient is “authorized to travel” after being discharged from a medical facility, the sun · asylum bidder may be deported to Mexico. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
A Mexican border official referred Carrasco, who was on crutches and in need of help, to the Global Response Management clinic, where he met Mileydis Tamayo, a Cuban nurse who is also seeking asylum. Tamayo has been treating Carrasco’s wound for 10 weeks.
“If that group didn’t exist,” Tamayo said, “a lot of people would be fine.”